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Earlier quoted context omitted.
WestWorld too.
Spoiler ahead In season 1 of the modern adaption of Westworld it's the robot actors that don't know they are not real. The customers know it's not real. If anything else happens in the books or the movies or other series I don't want to know.
Can someone confirm that this is real? It reads like (dismal) satire.
you'll find "establishment: april 1, 2009"
i think this is well written fiction
Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. >If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the dau…
Now imagine a future technology where you could undergo some hypnosis / gaslighting treatment to forget you even hired this person. I.e. pay a lot of money in advance, it's invested and the actor gets paid from the interest. You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor you hired years back because your actual mother died.
That's a pretty bad deal for both to be honest the client gets a fake they may even fool themselves is real (as they did) and he basically goes through all the bad parts of a relationships without being able to complain.
I kind of agree with faking it to keep up appearances like fake weddings for a lesbian daughter or a fake father so the school doesn't complain about something that is none of their business to begin with since Japanese society is the way it is but long term fake boyfriends and the like can't be healthy.
Well maybe some people are ok leading a fake life but personally if I have a void in my life that motivates me to fill it instead of patching it with a temporary stop gap.
It's the same reason I fix the cause of bugs in software not patch the symptoms they create. If I didn't do that I wouldn't be much of software developer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non American here: what do you mean by "inviting certain people to certain places"? Like to a wedding?
Well, for example, if 11 members of the 20 person track team are going somewhere after practice, you have to invite everyone you meet even if you don't want them there. Even if its totally impractical to invite them there. If you're at a park throwing a Frisbee with some people you know, and you happen to be going somewhere with one friend afterwards, it's almost mandatory to invite the others who are there, even if…
That wasn’t the effect you were demonstrating above. It was more “you have to invite [friend A] if you invite [friend B] from the same social group, unless you want [friend A] to think that you value them less than [friend B].”
Which is sometimes obviously what you want them to think—if you have known [friend B] for years and you’ve just joined the group that introduces you to [friend A], then hanging out solely with [friend B] (in a way that [friend A] will find out about, like by inviting them in front of them) is a way to assert that you’d like [friend A] to get to know you better, because you’re still not at the level where you feel comfortable adding them to your more close-knit friend group yet.
The problem comes when you’ve just joined a group and so only know everyone equally well (i.e. not that well), and yet only invite some of the group members somewhere anyway. This reads like the signal above, but without a justification: the people you chose to invite out did nothing to “deserve” the choice, and there’s no obvious thing (like more shared conversation) that you’re signalling that you’d like out of the people you didn’t invite. It can seem like you’re just sociopathically playing members of the group against each-other to win your favour.
But that’s really the only scenario where this applies: when picking a subset of acquaintances, from a shared group, to do something with that is usually reserved for friends. (It does come up a lot, because a “pool of shared acquaintances” describes a school pretty well. But it’s not nearly as much of a “thing” outside of that.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its also because Japanese dont have much to talk about in the first place. Look at their media, its all tabloid level at best, and you would have a hard time finding people who talk about other things than completely mundane subjects in ANY context. I think this is mostly due to an education trying to kill any ounce of individual thinking.
How much time have you spent in Japan or among Japanese people?
At least part of his position is true though -- the education system really doesn't cultivate critical thinking or original thought (other than the elite prep schools which are great at fostering individuality).
Can someone confirm that this is real? It reads like (dismal) satire.
Another commenter posted that the company is listed as "Established April 1 2009" but that is likely just for financial reasons, as April 1st is the start of the financial year.
That said, while the company is real I don't think it is common or in widespread use. I've never had a conversation about such a company or heard of anyone ever using one in the past few years in Japan. Remember, the media often likes to play up the "Weird Japan" angle.
(Of course, if they were doing their job perfectly then we would never know about it...)
Sounds like the mind of psychopaths.
Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. >If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the dau…
Same here. I can't help but wonder about the ethical implications of lying to a child about something so fundamental for her entire lifetime.
This reminds me of an episode of the podcast Weird Work where they interview someone who works as a bridesmaid for hire. For a fee, she'll help with wedding planning and go as far as flying out to act the part of bridesmaid in your wedding [1]. So this isn't just a Japanese thing. Just as I think that most people in the US would find hiring a bridesmaid in the US to be a little bit weird, I'm sure most people in Japa…